AI Search Has ARRIVED (Are you ChatGPT & Gemini-ready?)

AI search has arrived—and it’s reshaping how buyers discover and evaluate companies.

In this episode of Spiraling Up, the team welcomes Leah from Brandi to explore the rise of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and what marketers must do to stay visible in tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Leah explains why the shift from traditional SEO to AI search changes the rules of digital marketing. Instead of simply matching keywords, AI systems evaluate intent, authority, and share of voice across an entire market conversation to determine which companies get recommended. 

The discussion also explores how AI prompts compress the traditional marketing funnel, why content strategy must evolve to answer real user questions, and how businesses can track how AI models are describing and comparing them to competitors. 

They also tackle a dangerous assumption many marketers are making today: that AI search is just another SEO tactic or a temporary trend. 

If you’re responsible for marketing, brand visibility, or demand generation, this episode will help you understand how to prepare for a world where AI assistants increasingly decide which companies get recommended.

Connect with Leah on LinkedIn
Learn more about Brandi

Transcript

Austin McNair 0:00

Tell me if you've heard any of these acronyms before, GEO, AEO, LLM, SEO, all these different things that we keep hearing about, and maybe your boss is asking you, Hey, what do these mean for our company? Right now? Every marketer needs to be learning about this issue because at the end of the day. What is AI saying about your business? These are the questions that we need to answer, and it's why on today's episode of Spiraling Up, we're bringing in our guest, Leah Nric to understand exactly. What we as marketers should be monitoring and learning about so that we can get control of this AI search question and bring some new intelligence and power into our business. so if you're trying to learn more about GEO and what you could be doing about it as a marketer, you're gonna wanna watch this. Welcome everyone. This is spiraling up with Hinge. Welcome everyone to spiraling Up the podcast for professional services marketers and leaders. My name is Austin, and as always, I am joined by my colleagues and co-hosts, Mary Blanche Kramer

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 1:08

What's up Austin?

Austin McNair 1:09

and Joe Pope. What's happening, Joe?

Joe Pope 1:13

It is time to crack the bubbly. Boys and girls

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 1:16

Oh yeah. What we celebrating,

Joe Pope 1:18

we're celebrating season two of Spiraling Up. We have made it one full calendar year.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 1:25

let's go.

Joe Pope 1:28

For people who are listening, I am holding a bottle of champagne.

Austin McNair 1:33

know there's some, some good podcast statistics out there. I don't know what percentage of it is. We'll have to ask Producer John, but, uh, I heard a rumor that most podcasts don't make it past 10 episodes. It's like maybe 80%, 98%, and we've made it past 24 episodes. So yeah, I mean, congratulations to us. I think that's a pretty big, uh, pretty big accomplishment. What has been, when you guys look at a year of podcasting, what has been kind of, uh, one of your favorite episodes that just comes to your mind?

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 2:00

Honestly, the, the Jonathan Eldridge episode that we just did, um, that's, that one definitely sticks out to me. That one's close to my heart. I loved the book, um, and a dear friend of mine. So, um, I just felt like that one really motivated the, the audience a lot with, with some of that content. I know. What about you, Joe?

Joe Pope 2:17

Yeah, that's a really good choice. And honestly, the metrics back it up. Uh, one of the most fun things about this entire podcasting process is to be able to. See what works and doesn't work. And you know, YouTube's got some fantastic statistics that we can look at and measure success and, and so forth. But, uh, no, I think my favorite episode is, uh, the one we recently recorded, the three of us together in the great city of Richmond, Virginia. Uh, specifically the one we had, we did two episodes there, but specifically the one about, uh, brands, crazy, stupid, rebrands, uh, was just fantastic. Making up a apples to Apples game. Somehow pulling that off. Thanks. Shouts to CVS in Richmond, Virginia, but in general, I think we've really been able to kind of step up the production quality, step up the content. We're getting some wonderful feedback. I know Austin, you're typically soliciting, but I'll solicit right now. Keep those messages coming into us. A podcast@hingemarketing.com. We are super excited for season two and hopefully season three and four to follow.

Austin McNair 3:19

Yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, behind the scenes here, you, you, you described it as. Hey, we're on the Chase to 50 episodes now. So, um, yeah, for all the, all the listeners and people watching on YouTube, welcome to the Chase to 50, uh, episodes of Spiraling Up. We've had some great guests. We're gonna have even more great guests later this year. We've got an excellent guest today. Um, I know I'm super excited because this is more of the marketing SEO search space that I revel in talking about. Uh, our guest today, she's just brilliant. I'm just super excited for this conversation. I think every marketer needs to understand what's happening with AI search, and I know that. Everyone watching this is gonna get something really, uh, really great out of it. Some great insight. So why don't we turn now to meet our guest. Hey everyone, real quick before we talk to our guest today, you know from the description of this episode that we are talking about all things GEO and actually Hinge is sort of at the forefront of this in terms of how we are assisting and helping our clients understand the world of AI search and actually implement and use tools. To understand what's going on. What is AI saying about your business? How does AI compare you to your competitors? You can't just know by searching it one time on chat GPT, you need tools that will regularly allow you to gather this information and implement changes. And that's exactly what Hinge helps our clients do. And if that sounds like something that would be interesting to you and your business, then go ahead and sign up for a free consultation. Just go to hinge marketing.com/ GEO fill out a little form, and if Joe thinks you're cool enough, we'll get a meeting. We'll book a meeting, we'll talk about it. Maybe I'll even set up a little demo for you and we can look at and talk about your business and what AI's saying about it. How does that sound? So Hinge marketing.com Sounds great. Yeah. So Hinge marketing.com/g. Let's do a little, uh, consultation together. Now. Let's go meet our guest. Uh, Leah. Welcome to Spiraling Up.

Leah 5:22

Hi guys. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so to.

Austin McNair 5:26

We are really excited to have you as well. some of our audience,'cause a lot of our clients listen to our podcast will know that, Hinge. We've been working with, you and your team over at Brandy for, quite a few months now, uh, using your product, really diving into this world of AI search and Leah, we're just so excited to bring a lot of this information to the podcast today for those who are maybe just learning about GEO or trying to understand and make sense of what's going on in the world.

Leah 5:52

No, it's a, it's super exciting. It's brand new and agencies like Hinge that are leading the way for their clients. That's what the industry needs. It needs that education and people who are super passionate about these new technologies and, and that's what brands need in order to make an impact. So thanks for having me and thanks for using the product and giving us feedback and all those good things.

Joe Pope 6:15

Like every good partnership, you gotta be able to, you gotta be able to share that type of feedback. But you know, Leah, as part of my job, I do a lot of our initial conversations and I hear all the time, found you guys via search, on chat, GPT, perplexity, Gemini, all these various tools. So yeah, you're right. This is new. This is hot. How did you stumble into it though? I mean, what was the thing that really convinced you that this was the. Area of focus for you and to launch this new product.

Leah 6:40

Yeah, well, uh, I stumbled into it like I do with most things headfirst, um, without meaning to, uh, yeah, So I was running an agency for 14 years working with B2B Tech companies, and in the sales process people started asking, okay, if we hire you to do all this incredible and amazing PR work and content work, how's that gonna actually affect how I'm being positioned in AI search responses? And this was before anybody started talking about GEO or AEO. And to be honest, I was like, I'm not really sure, like, scratching my head. Um, and I was lucky enough to be surrounded by some super duper smart people who are interested always in new technology. And so we kind of started hacking at it and, uh, just, trying to figure it out. Um, we used our own website as kind of a alpha test, and just to see what would ha Yeah. Guinea pig. Yeah, exactly. Not eating our own dog food, but drinking our own champagne, as I like to say. And, then we kind of figured it out and I've been lucky enough to know a lot of people over my time, um, that are great, technologists, engineers and people ad tech and who had the domain expertise. And so we just thought to ourselves after having some conversations like, Hey, what do you think about this? what about this theory? we ended up building a, a great product. I think it's great you guys like it. Our, uh, customers like it. and it works and that's what's really amazing too, is that, we had a vision, but we listen to the feedback and we see it just work incredibly and that's exciting.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 8:11

Y can you talk to us a little bit more about what that last year has been like as you worked up to the launch of Brandy?

Leah 8:17

Yes, very tiring. Number one. you know, I had, uh, I feel so completely reinvigorated by my work. Um, I had been doing the same thing for a long time, um, and had worked with hundreds of different software companies and some times I'd become a little rote, you know? and the agency world can be a little cuckoo crazy, as you guys know. Um, just, you know, I think it takes a special kind of. Uh, crazy lovably, insane person to work in the agency business. we all are, uh, you know, multitaskers to the hilt. And, I guess, I just, after a while I felt a little like, okay, what's next? You know? And now I just feel so. Just excited and, um, working really hard, like I'm, you know, fresh outta college and working all night and with a big smile on my face and, um, I'm tired, but I'm just, setting boundaries, making sure I'm taking my vitamins and, um, and also just, uh, seeing the impact and it's just been awesome.

Austin McNair 9:16

That's so cool. Well, Leah, uh, as you mentioned, a lot of marketers, business leaders out there, there, there's some pressure out there. There, there's pressure to understand like. What is GEO and how the heck does it work? so in today's episode of Spiraling Up, we've created a game for you. we're gonna take all that pressure and we're gonna put it into our little episode here for a segment. We're calling pressure prompts. essentially in the world of GEO, we know that AI models are essentially these super advanced engines that are trying to predict the next best word to complete a thought, right? So, Leah, we're gonna put you in the hot seat as our human large language model. You're our human AI today, and we're gonna give you a series of prompts, regarding the future of search, branding, reputation, and, you know, Brandy's own intelligence and kind of stuff that you've learned along the way, to just complete our prompts with the most high value, significant insight that you've got. So. No pressure, but everybody's gonna be on the edge of their seats waiting to hear what you say. So

Joe Pope 10:27

No

Leah 10:28

God, no pressure at all,

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 10:29

pressure at all.

Leah 10:30

I do have a question. So you know how you can customize the voice on ChatGPT to like whatever you want? So should I, should I just use my regular voice or should I try to do an Irish accent or try to sound like Daniel Craig? Or can I just be me? I'm just gonna be me. Is that

Joe Pope 10:48

No. Yes. The answer to that is yes. Whatever you want to do, please

Austin McNair 10:52

we, I

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 10:53

Please feel free to mix it up.

Austin McNair 10:57

I was gonna say.

Leah 10:58

or Oliver? Oliver from Oliver Twist.

Joe Pope 11:01

Oh.

Austin McNair 11:02

I, I was gonna say, Leah, I've, I, we've gotten to spend a lot of time together, you know, in sort of our partnership and, and, and I've gotten to, to experience a lot of your training. I want you to be full Leah today. I, the, I think the, the audience is gonna be, uh, they're gonna love, love your energy and kind of what you bring to this, uh,

Leah 11:19

Okay. Uh, that's, that's a load off because, uh, the, the accent game is not really

Joe Pope 11:24

Not that's gonna work for you. It's not gonna play.

Austin McNair 11:27

All right. So, uh, Mary Blanche, uh, you're going to be, uh, feeding Leah the, the prompts today. So, uh, what do we got? Let's get started.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 11:36

yeah. All right, let's do it. So the first pressure prompt is drum roll producer John. if SEO was about keywords, GEO is primarily about blank.

Leah 11:50

Intent.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 11:52

Okay.

Leah 11:52

So we know that the news algorithms are actually trying to deconstruct what the intent is of the questions that are being asked. So that's much different than matching a keyword with a keyword in a question or in a web search. It's actually, Hey, how do I give you a valuable answer? So I would say geo is really about aligning, um, to the intent of your prospects, your customers, potential buyers. Next.

Austin McNair 12:22

No, no, no, no, no. We're gonna

Leah 12:24

no.

Joe Pope 12:24

don't. You don't get away that easy.

Austin McNair 12:26

intent. Yeah. So, you know, when I think about, how I think about intent as a marketer, sometimes I'll think about like, okay, what are like the stages of the funnel, right? Like, how do I adjust my marketing to appeal to people that are maybe more top of funnel, bottom funnel? when you think about how marketers should be thinking about intent. Within the context of, AI search, is that like one of the frames you might look at it, or like what, what are some other ways that people should be thinking about intent as, it comes to them, engineering their websites, engineering their content strategies? how do you actually see that playing out with some of your customers?

Leah 13:00

Yeah. I think that's a super important point. So the way I think about it is exactly like what you were saying. I'm guessing the majority of your, uh, listeners are B2B, so I'm gonna just focus kind on the B2B funnel for now, if that's okay. All right. So. And Austin, you said it totally right? Right. You got the top, middle, bottom is the traditional B2B funnel. so the way I think about it is you need to align intent based upon what is the funnel'cause like in Brandy, We actually categorize and classify prompts according to funnel Stage. like when we were picking a payment processing platform for Brandy, I think this is a great example. I went into chat, GPT. And I said, you know, what are the best payment processing platforms for, startup SaaS companies, right? So I started right at the top of information discovery. So that's how I think it, right? Think about it. But then in one. Interaction with it. I went top, middle, bottom, comparative bottom, and then popped out and I basically made my decision at the end and I had two and I went and I visited site and I poked around and then I made a decision in that day. So that way I think about it, is the prompts that aren't comparative. They're like that traditional funnel. And I always like to think about a content strategy that's gonna align with information discovery. So how do I get mentioned in the top of the funnel prompts when you have a business problem that you're looking to solve, such as, how do I take payments if I'm a startup SaaS company? Now, it would be great if you're a Stripe or QuickBooks, processing platform if it came back right away and said. You know? Yes, sychophantically, What a great question, Leah. Uh. When starting, when considering processing payments, these are the different PCI compliance issues that you need to follow and not storing credit card data. And, here's some recommendations from one of the leading. Payment processing platform Stripe, and you go, oh, Stripe, right? So that's at the top. And then it becomes increasingly like, how do I get my brand inserted in that funnel? And then when I get to the bottom and somebody says, Hey, compare stripe with QuickBooks payment processing or clerks version of payment processing. And then what do those things all look like? Side by side. Those are different stages, right? But, uh, you need to be inserted and positioned in the way that you wanna be positioned and accurately in all stages of that.

Joe Pope 15:37

You know, one thing, Leah, we've noticed recently, especially as I've asked people just anecdotally when they come in and how'd you find us, those types of questions is we're hearing more and more, I searched for my specific industry in a LLM. Right. Uh, and so what I'm guessing you've kind of seen some similar trends too as you've explored this, where, you know, these platforms are really leaning into some of these targeting characteristics in the intent behind what this person is looking for and what their goals they're trying to see. I, I, I would imagine you're thinking and seeing a lot of that as well.

Leah 16:10

Yeah, it's the AI will read, extract, summarize, and return content that's authoritative, credible, and answers the question that people most likely are to ask. And so the core to that is what are the questions people are most likely to ask? What type of content should I use to answer it? How should I structure my content from a readability standpoint? And then what do I do technically on the backend? So that's where Brandy and not to, tout brandy and how great it is, but it is,

Joe Pope 16:42

It is pretty great.

Leah 16:43

It's pretty awesome. But besides that, it's um, that, that intelligence layer is. The key, like what is it that people wanna know? What are their pain points? Who are they? Where is there a lack of, answer? Like, where's the gap, the delta between what's out there today, and then what you can put out there to answer that question.

Austin McNair 17:05

Yeah, I'm excited to dig in more. I think we should move on to our next question, but my mind's already spinning in terms of just like how much I've learned over the last year. I think a lot of people and, marketers specifically who have. They understand the world of SEO really well. I love your word intent because it's like, it is a shift in how we think about how we want to be discovered. the, the, the simplest example I'm giving my clients right now is that, last year, so think about 2025, our company, this is before we were really measuring. GEO results on a regular basis. we wrote a series of articles that were industry specific and year specific. So what are the top techniques for accounting firms in 2025? and those never, I mean, we do this every year. Historically, those never performed well for us in traditional SEO. They never got discovered by search engines. They never got, to the top of searches or garnered any like kind of organic search traffic. But last year, all of them. Got traffic through ChatGPT and Perplexity. And I think it's because exactly what you said, like it's that intent of like, this is timely and it's like specific to, uh, exactly what the person was asking. So it's almost like the user got a better result too.

Leah 18:16

Okay. Just say something that's interesting about that Austin too, is that not only, like you're saying, like you didn't really get traffic to those before, but it's not, it's. In addition to that, that's a new entry point for a website, right? Like traditionally, people don't go land on a blog unless you're, you know, you're navigating or you're syndicating it. But now you have the opportunity for conversion at all places that might be cited by AI which for a lot of companies means that they need to rethink their web development and web architecture strategy. Because where you didn't traditionally have a conversion optimization priority, now you do. So what does that look like for web designs and agencies like Hinge and others that rethink that conversion optimization for an era of AI referral traffic, will, you know, really be able to make a huge impact for their clients.

Joe Pope 19:09

That's right.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 19:09

Hmm. All right, you guys, I'm seeing a lightning round in our, in our future, but this is, this is just such, such an interesting topic. Um, I wanna move us onto the, I wanna move us onto the next question. all right. So the most dangerous assumption that A CMO can make about AI search right now is the blank.

Leah 19:28

That it's a flash in the pan,

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 19:30

Mm. Okay.

Leah 19:33

or. What I've heard and is also very dangerous, which is kind of it's a flash in the pan, is GEO is just SEO.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 19:43

Um.

Leah 19:44

I hear that all the time and I hear it from, SEO people that don't wanna evolve. and so, I mean, it's, it's hard, it's hard to get your head around something that's so incredibly different from a paradigm. So yeah, I would say GEO is not only SEO and AI is not a flash in the pan. I actually had somebody tell me that. That's why it stuck in my head. I was like, okay, I'll talk to you in six months.

Austin McNair 20:13

the flash in the pan thing I think is really hard to take that stance and defend it. Uh, I, I don't, I don't see any. Conceivable future where there's gonna be less AI search It just seems like everything is gonna be curated through AI in the future. and that's gonna get more and more invisible probably in the way that we use technology and, and tools to find solutions and find products. on the, on the G-E-O-S-E-O side, though, Leah, it's something that we've talked about in the podcast before and we've joked about. because there is, I think, like a distinct overlap, right? and it's funny because as an agency, and I'm sure you, you know this as well, like, we've spent years trying to convince some, prospects to make investments in SEO and they just don't, buy it at all. And when I kind of assess the scene, I'm like, it seems like that, many of the people who, Might now be excited about AI search and kind of GEO. some of them are the same people that like wrote off like a content strategy and like traditional SEO practices and before and so that's been kind of confusing to me'cause I'm like, you know that there's a lot of overlap here. And had you just been investing in this over the past, five, 10 years, you'd be way more well positioned for AI search now than you were before. So I, I'm wondering if there any way you'd like to parse through that at all in terms of uh, I mean, we've already touched on the difference between SEO and GEO, but I don't know. I, I, I, there is like a lot of best practices that still overlap, but it's definitely, you're saying not the same.

Leah 21:46

no. So I think about it like this, and I just wrote an article about this, like defining what is S-E-O-A-E-O-G-O. So what I, here's how I think about it. Like they are the best bedfellows. So if you don't, SEO is the cornerstone. If you can't be indexed. You can't be read, summarized, extracted, and returned by an AI engine, so you better make sure that every page is indexed. And Austin, I think you've heard me say this time and time again that I, I like my little new metric that I like to call TTI. Which is time to index ability, because you're not gonna start showing up in AI if the page isn't indexed. And we all know that indexing is being slowed down and Google's, you know, there, there's been some changes there. So if you don't have good SEO, you can't be indexed if you don't have category alignment. You can't be indexed correctly. And if you have all those things then, then it's time to focus on maximizing your content strategy. I think for AI search and AI visibility, so they go hand in hand. I just don't think that the statement which we hear often, especially on a lot of these Reddit channels and on the podcasts and stuff like that,

Joe Pope 23:04

The tech bros.

Leah 23:06

Yeah. I was listening to a very, uh, well-known marketing podcast, um, where the guy who we've probably all heard of, many times kept saying, you know, well, you know, I just do is I just, just go to chat GPT and I just asked the questions that I know people are gonna be asking. And I see if my brand comes back and if my brand comes back, then you have a good GEO strategy. It's like, no, That is not a growth strategy for managing AI visibility in this new AI driven, landscape. it's important. People will come around to see the distinctions between them, and it's not one versus the other. It's how are they all entwined? but I, I just make one other point is that. The algorithm have changed anyway, like Google has come out and said, I mean, it's different. So the way that they are focusing more on an intent, you still need all those technical things, but you just need to think about your content strategy and evolve your SEO content strategy to be questioned, task aligned, and to be structured in a way that's different. I mean, Austin, do you, think that the content is structured differently now under GO than it would be under SEO or how do you guys think differently about it?

Austin McNair 24:18

Yeah. I mean, I think that, for me, I, I, I think it's just the imagination of. Our strategy has expanded, right? Like there's such a difference between just having a. A strategy that is focused on ranking versus a strategy, like you said, that's focused on intent and even sentiment, right? Like we're trying to, in a lot of cases, and especially with some of our clients, like we're not just trying to rank for an answer, but we're actually trying to steer. The narrative about the different issues that we speak to. And, you know, at Hinge for professional services marketing, we've already, we've always done that through research and we use our research to, to guide our content strategy. For a lot of our clients, you know, that are in very specialized industries, it's the same thing. Like they don't want to just be ranking for stuff. They want to be actually steering the conversation. And if you don't have A consistent ability to, to measure and to track if those perspectives are being discovered inside AI answers like then yeah, I think you're probably missing a whole part of the game right now that is available to you.

Leah 25:19

and just, um, to that point, the ability to track thematic changes based upon the content that you create. So much greater, like the, strategic implication of that is much greater than what we were focusing on for keywords. I came out of the PR business originally. I mean, we would be hired time and time again to define markets. Like, Hey, I've got this brand new disruptive product. It's going to reframe all of cyber, or it's gonna reframe old. Trench market, like ERP. It's like what? ERP. Sexy again? Yeah. Great. Okay. How? How is that sexy? Okay. And then they show it to you and you say, wow, that is different. Now what do we have to do? We have to go on a quest to reframe people's perception of what the ideal status quo is, and the ability to track that is just. It's like you can do it in Brandy and I. To me that was always the holy grail as a comms person of how, can I actually measure instead of anecdotally what I'm doing is impacting global perception of a definition of a market category.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 26:31

Okay, I wanna jump in here'cause our next one is like right along, right along this topic. So, unlike Google search where you are fighting for rank in generative ai, you are fighting for blank.

Leah 26:43

Share a voice.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 26:44

Okay.

Leah 26:45

if you think about it like you've got a market universe, okay? Like let's say I'm HubSpot and I'm in my CRM market universe, it's not just, I can't just focus on me HubSpot, I'm the brand. Right, and I can't just focus on, oh, Salesforce is my biggest competitor. There's all these tangential brands that are influencing the conversation. Maybe it's like a telesales company or a support module over here that's a little, little company and they're nipping at my heels. Or somebody who's, you know, doing only email marketing in one industry. So I need to understand how my voice, if I'm HubSpot. Dominates and defines my market sector in accordance with all the other people that are participating in the conversation. And we call that share of voice.

Austin McNair 27:32

Share voice is always something we've talked about from like a PR standpoint. It's funny'cause like this is like one of those areas that. Is distinctly different from like all the SEO stuff we were just talking about. Leah, I'm curious, like in the way that you designed Brandy, like how early on did you guys recognize that Share a voice was such an important component to finding success and like allowing companies to like make progress in this area?

Leah 27:55

It was one of our core ones from the beginning because I think again, that goes. We came from a place of domain expertise, like you were saying around pr, that you have your traditional media share of voice. But so if you think about AI search results, answers at its own universe of like context, right? So for media, share of voice and pr, it was always. How am I in earned media only? And now you've got ai, which is the share of voice from earned media, from message boards, from social, from industry publications, from owned content, competitive content. So it's a much broader universe than solely media. Um, so I guess, I think, but you know, media, the media share voice is still super important for measuring. For those things. But I think that because we had that domain expertise, it just became one of the core things. I also think that the way that we set up brandy as like a universe versus just focused on one brand, which, traditional SEO tactical tools were like, okay, I'm putting you right in the middle. And then you've got these other kind of, that you're naming around you. It's not like that we kind of take the opposite approach, like let's set up the universe. And where are you in that universe? which is a very different, approach and I think more extracted out based upon that kind of, again, I think that domain expertise coming from a PR world of market definition and seeing like, okay, you know, it goes beyond a key word and it's about what is the whole experience, within that universe.

Austin McNair 29:33

It does. And actually I, I think our next prompt question for you, Leah, is like right on the same topic here. Uh, and B, what's next?

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 29:41

Yeah. Okay. So next one is when a prospect asks an AI to compare multiple companies, the winner is usually determined by the AI's perception of blank.

Leah 29:54

credibility and authority. Can I do give two?

Austin McNair 29:57

Yeah.

Joe Pope 29:58

I think so. You're the, you're the mad libber. You're filling in the blanks. You tell us.

Leah 30:04

Um, yeah, I'd say, authority and credibility. So it, it's influenced by the way the brand is perceived and what it associates with the brand behind the scenes, right? so that's important, but keep in mind that it is going to pull in answers that are things that maybe you don't want it. To pull in because of reviews. If you have negative reviews, that's why it's so important to identify the cited sources and like the domains that are actually considered within your market universe, what is authoritative and credible? Because before when you might have just focused on one discipline of. PR or SEO or content creation or your website or your, you know, the look and feel of your brand. Now we know that it is synthesis of all of the authoritative, credible things. So that means that today's marketer cannot only be a domain expert. They have to be a synthesizer and strategist across all the different, disciplines within the marketing organization.

Joe Pope 31:08

See, I, I love this answer that you just gave and one of the biggest reasons is Hinge has preached the good word that a brand and professional services is the intersection of reputation and visibility. It's not colors, logos, all those types of things. Because at the end of the day, when you buy professional services, you're buying expertise, right? So now we have a tool. That thinks very similarly. We need to be, pulling in information from experts. We need to be pulling in from, experts who are on multiple platforms, that they have shown that they are credible, that this authority actually means something. versus, the older days of SEO that could get hacked by bad back linking and all that kind of crap. it's gone. And, and I think this just is why we see organizations that have a good commitment to content strategy and still thinking along the lines of how do we, uh, infuse our brand and our voice and what makes us different into our content are gonna see the rewards of that. We hinge ourselves, have seen the rewards that in how our traffic's being generated through LLMs.

Austin McNair 32:15

Yeah, and and to your point, Joe, like I think a lot of times marketers like directors, CMOs we're really good at measuring that visibility part of the brand equation. We are traditionally not as tapped in, I think, to the reputation piece. And I think this is where like the AI search component that, that Leah's talking about is where I think there's probably a lot of exposure out there for some companies. I can give a quick example, where, I did a spot check for a prospect and I just said, Hey, tell me about this company. Did a couple of different, platforms, reviews. Something that came up every single time for them was some Glassdoor reviews. for those that don't know Glassdoor, Glassdoor is where, you know, either happy or disgruntled current or former employees go and leave reviews about a company. But when you asked about this particular company, what came up was like these really negative reviews about their brand from like eight years ago. And I'm like, okay, so we have a clear objective here. we need more stuff out there about your company so that it's not just this Glassdoor reviews that are the first thing that had pulled up when people ask AI about your company. and the shock on the person's face. During the situation I mean, I felt really bad for them, but like it's just, kind of how it is now. And again, it gives you kind of a clear objective, right, Leah to like, these are narratives that we can shift rather quickly, if we understand where we need to, you know, maybe apply some attention or some pressure to, to kind of steer or change the, the narrative of our company.

Leah 33:46

Yeah, totally. I mean, you, you got it. Like, I, I agree a hundred percent. I always tell customers, you know, AI is going to identify what is authoritative, what is credible, and what is most recent. Unless it's using training data. And, that's a whole other conversation about when does it go online and when doesn't it? But the point is to future proof your business, you need to put out content that is authoritative, credible, and you need to do it on a continuous basis, because whoever answered the question, who's authoritative and credible, and most recent, whoever answered it last. The billing, not you. So that means that, you know, we all remember the days, like 2012 to 2016 where everybody was blogging four times a week or eight blogs a month, and it was like, The good old days. let's get that content out there. And then everybody was like, well no, because now I've got the keyword and now I only know I need to maintain it. That is completely different now. It, this is a fundamental shift for marketers and for agencies in general, that the output of perpetual content that is answering the questions that people need answered, which by the way, changes in real time all the time. So you need that loop of how do I identify what people care about? How do I address it in a way that is mission oriented and honest and authentic and credible and authoritative. And then what's the next question that they're gonna ask? And then you just go, and that is the future. that's it. I mean that, that's where we are and that's what's gonna happen. And. Those folks who get on board now will future proof their strategy as there's more, models getting trained and coming through now on that stuff. And then, if you don't do it now, you're going to miss the boat and then you're gonna be playing catch up.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 35:41

Well, Austin gave, uh, that really good example. So it just so happens that our, our next question kind of tags right along into that. Uh, so Leah, if an AI engine is hallucinating negative information about your brand, what's the very first thing that you have to fix?

Leah 35:59

I don't know about the hallucination because my experience has been, it's not gonna hallucinate if it can find an answer. So I guess the answer to that would be, you better put out the right answer, because if it's making it up. Oh, and I guess, you know, I could see that happening more often. If it's like a comparative search right at the bottom of the funnel, like, you know, what about this brand versus that brand? And it can't find an answer because you haven't done any good PR and you don't have any content, and then it's gonna make it up. Um, yeah, so that, no, okay, I understand now. So then the answer is put out the right answer. Get it out there and get it indexed and craft the content, and they earn media that backs it up and the review programs and all that to counter negative sentiment or the hallucination.

Joe Pope 36:44

A very PR type answer. I like it.

Leah 36:46

Yeah, I mean, I, we had a customer who's a PE platform company who got, um, they've done like 10, 12 acquisitions over the past five years. And when they, yeah, and they, when they implemented Brandy, they were like, oh my God, these brands that we had rebranded years ago to be underneath our umbrella, they're still popping up. And with Brandy, they were able to actually identify exactly where it was coming from and what the source was. and for them it was easy enough to fix because it was one of their resellers who was using the old brands and it was being indexed like that. But if you have the wrong information out there, like even pricing. we see this all the time with new customers. They're like, oh my God, we're this pricing is from 2022. How's it get out there? And then you click on the link and it's from training data from 2022.'cause it can't find anything else that's more recent with updated content. So exactly to that point. It is, um, it's a game of con not a game because it's not a game. It's not a tricky, tricky game. It's an author, it's an authentic game. It's a mission oriented game. It's a, it's a quest.

Joe Pope 37:51

A war game.

Leah 37:52

No, no, no. It's a quest in the best possible way for mission-driven companies to go out there and tell the truth from the mountaintops or the digital mountaintops about their brand.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 38:05

All right. This is another really good segue, uh, into the next question. I love how these just keep aligning for us. but the, the specific type of earned media that carries the most weight in a generative engine's knowledge graph is blank.

Leah 38:19

Depends.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 38:20

Yeah.

Leah 38:21

so I love this question and here's why. I was just at a conference where there were all these, really accomplished PR people from the really big firms giving presentations. and you know, these are really smart, smart guys and gals and peeps, right? All I kept seeing up there was 82% of AI citations are earned media. And I'm like, nah, depends. It depends on the market. It depends on the market universe. CRM, no. Nope, nope. Uh, Jeep. Yeah. Why? Because Jeep and Rivian, all these other like four wheeling brands, they, they don't really put out own content and blocks, right? So they're relying on like motor trend and car and driver and Kelly's Blue book. But if you're looking to buy CRM software, I know last month this is just, I know this is so random, but. I know this because we put out these AI visibility indexes on different markets, and for the CRM market universe, the number one cited, URL was a PC magazine buyer's guide for CRM. But that doesn't mean it was like that. All the citations and all the domains that were being pulled in were all, like 82% of them were all earned media. They weren't, you know, who was number one cited the most. For like multiple domains, Salesforce, so that's competitive to HubSpot or corporate information. So it's really depends, which sounds like a wishy-washy answer. But I love this question because it's true. it really depends on the market and what's out there to answer the user intent. Also, if you're in a very technical industry or an industry that, um, or even a geography that, um,'cause we see this, we have customers all over the world and agency partners all over the world. the key to getting to becoming. A citation is being, yes, authoritative and credible, but readable and findable by the ai, right? So there's certain things you need to do, like technical structure, and that's why they have people, higher agencies like Hinge in order to help them optimize all their content. So in some older school type industries. You don't see as much earned media because those trade pubs haven't figured out yet how to get read by the ai. But if you're talking about a lot of consumer goods, you'll see more, right? So it just depends.

Austin McNair 40:59

I think that's fair. I think, well, you know, we try not to accept answers like depends and stuff like that, but we, I think fair enough, you

Joe Pope 41:06

Usually we usually we give one fence, sitting, answer, like when we've had that type of thing with a,

Leah 41:10

All of the above.

Joe Pope 41:12

yeah, you get one, but that's it. It's done. It's.

Austin McNair 41:17

Well, I've been notified by our producer that, we're running outta time, so Leo, if you're okay with it, we're gonna transition to a lightning round.

Leah 41:25

Oh my

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 41:25

round.

Austin McNair 41:26

cue the thunder and lightning sound effects that we always get. So I, I guess, you know, lightning round, you know, we'd love to hear how you'd fill in the end of the prompt there with maybe a, a quick explanation. But, uh, I, I'll refrain from opening my mouth, as much, uh, during the lightning round. And, uh, yeah, let's just see if we can crank through the rest of this. I've already learned so much. I mean, every time I'm on a. Call with Lee. I feel we're learning a lot. so listeners are getting a great experience here. yeah, let's start the clock, uh, mb why don't you kick us off lightning round?

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 41:58

All right, so about like one minute per answer. It looks like we've got about six left. Uh, so let's dive All right. First up, the technical metric most firms are ignoring, but brandy tracks religiously is blank.

Leah 42:15

Technical metric. I would say own, uh, domain citation. So how much of your owned content is influencing the narrative of the answers? Meaning your actual website? Because we can only control what we can control. Even earned media, you're herding cats and you're trying to control the narrative, but you can't, where can you control the narrative? Content. So we track that religiously.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 42:45

Okay, love that. Moving on since it's lightning round. next up, the, to improve your brand's site ability within chat, GPT or Gemini, you need to increase your blank.

Leah 42:59

Your question, task alignment and the technical structure that goes with it.

Joe Pope 43:05

Mm-hmm.

Leah 43:05

And if you use Brandy, it does it all for you. So I would just say, call

Joe Pope 43:11

plug. Really? Yeah. Really nice

Leah 43:14

our optimization, uh, uh, our Ag agentic optimization engine does just that for you. So, um, you can either, you know, spend 35 minutes on two sentences trying to figure it out, or you could run it through brandy and have it done in 15

Austin McNair 43:30

C, can you clarify for the listeners what is question task alignment?

Joe Pope 43:34

Yes.

Leah 43:35

How much does your content align with the questions that people are actually asking?

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 43:42

All right. Uh, next question. The unfair advantage early adopters of tools like Brandy have in the professional services space is blank.

Leah 43:52

Market domination. I mean, if you own the conversation, you dominate the market. So

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 43:57

a good answer.

Leah 43:59

not to be too dramatic, but the truth is the truth. Right.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 44:02

Yeah. All right. The first sign that your brand is invisible to AI search is blank.

Leah 44:11

If you don't come up in the answer.

Joe Pope 44:16

Yeah.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 44:17

if you're completely

Joe Pope 44:18

if you're not in there, oh, okay. I, I'll, I'll spin it for you. Uh, so if you're not. Able to find yourself, whether using a brandy tool or just flat out just playing in the tools these themselves and not finding yourself in any sort of prompts or questions, then you're probably in trouble at that point. So,

Leah 44:35

I like to say that the threat of ignoring AI visibility is existential, not just circumstantial. If it doesn't know you, you don't exist in the new landscape, so it's existential

Joe Pope 44:48

I'll sneak in a nice stat for, I believe the second or third year running the high growth organizations and professional services are primarily focused as their chief business concern on ai, and we have seen it over and over again. So, yeah, I guess if you're not paying attention to it, you're, you're.

Leah 45:06

you don't exist.

Joe Pope 45:07

Yeah, you're existentially dying.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 45:11

All right. I love this. Next question. The most provocative thing I can say about the future of brand discovery is blank.

Leah 45:21

I don't know if it's provocative, but I do think that the models have an opportunity to just, they, if they don't do it right. They will spend all the goodwill and capital that today's consumer has given them in trusting the answers. So if they don't handle the introduction of ads with transparency and making things obvious and all that, they will just waste. This incredible amount of trust and reliability that today's web user has for the answers of ai. So this is Aunt Leah talking. Sam, don't mess it up for all of us.

Austin McNair 46:11

I have to ask, what did you make of the, the Super Bowl commercial about Claude? never going ad, you know, going in with ads.

Leah 46:18

it was awesome. It's also, I mean, it, I loved it personally myself. I really liked the cougar one. I thought that was hilarious. Um, but, uh, I, someone's gotta change the cloud too. Like they, it's cost prohibitive. It just to run it operationally. The, it's, it. People are in love with it right now. The coding is great, all that, but operationally, the, the tokens are so high that they have to come down or they're gonna be SOL before they even start. And I mean, today, I know we're probably, you know, AI content should be evergreen. Um, but I will say that today they crashed. so they've got some, they got some splaining to do and they've got some evolving to do in this new market. You still have to monetize something, so figure it out.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 47:10

So figure it out. All right. So we've got one more. I think it's a really good one to end on. the last one is if you want to win the AI search war, your first move tomorrow morning should be blank.

Leah 47:26

I mean, I'd love to say request a demo, however.

Mary-Blanche Kraemer 47:30

That's

Joe Pope 47:30

can if you want

Leah 47:31

Okay. Request a demo. Request a Brandy AI demo at www No. No. Anyway, no, that's not, um, no, that's, that's not the answer. I think there's one thing people. A lot of people are waiting in the wings to see what the more innovative companies do. There is not much risk to taking on an AI strategy that is focused on not trying to trick anything but being authoritative, credible, and speaking your truth about your brand. And if you do that, just like your mother told you to do the same thing on your first day of kindergarten, you do that with your brand. And all will be right with the world as Pollyanna-ish, as that may sound. It is true.

Austin McNair 48:17

round of applause for Leah making it through the lightning round, making it through all the, the, the pressure prompts. Hopefully that wasn't too much pressure. You did great. I.

Leah 48:26

No, thanks. I, I will say you guys keep using the word prompts and I live in the AI world, so I'm like the prompts or the prompts, so.

Austin McNair 48:36

Well, as I mentioned, we always learn anytime we're, uh, speaking with you, and I'm super excited for our listeners to, to get into this, to hear more and learn more about this space. I think for professional services, just quite frankly, sometimes. We work in industries that are a little bit slow to adapt to, uh, technology, especially technology like this that's moving quickly. So, this is, I think really good, hopefully kick in the rear for some of us that are learning about this and, trying to get on top of it. So, uh, Leah, thank you so much. Uh, every time we spend time with you, we, we, we learn something new. Uh, where can people follow you? Where can they learn more about brandy?

Leah 49:18

Oh, awesome. Yeah, thanks Austin. You can follow me on LinkedIn at um Leah Gabriel Nric, or you can follow us on LinkedIn at Brandy ai or come visit us on our website for a demo@mybrandy.ai.

Joe Pope 49:37

Or you could type it into an LLM.

Leah 49:40

Yes, and it will tell you how amazing we are because we drink our own champagne over here at Brandy or check us out on G two. We've got great reviews.

Austin McNair 49:49

You do. All right, that is the, uh, end of our episode. So for everybody listening. Make sure you go and, like the YouTube video, subscribe to our channel, leave us a review, send us any questions you have at podcast@hingemarketing.com. and we will continue to grow this podcast and have great guests like Leah on board. thank you everybody. On behalf of everyone at Hinge, see you the next one.